The United States is the world’s largest democracy, we spend an obscene amount of money on elections–more than any other country–and we have the lowest voter turnout. The trend has been: the more money that is spent, the lower the turnout.

Since the 2014 election– which had the lowest voter turnout since 1942– many people have been asking: Why aren’t Americans voting? When you consider thehorrible financial mess the Tea Party is making of red states like Arizona, there also been a lot of non-voter bashing and shaming. But does that do any good? I think not.

At a recent John Nichols event, hosted by PDA Tucson and the Pima Area Labor Federation, Nichols shed light onto the inverse relationship between money spent and votes cast.

Nichols told the crowd of approximately 130 progressives and unionists that Americans don’t vote because negative television commercials repeatedly tell us not to. Check out this excerpt from his talk below.

New bill signed Monday means that any eligible voter who does business with the Department of Motor Vehicles will be automatically registered

Bucking the nation-wide trend of eroding voting rights, the state of Oregon on Tuesday signed into law a bill that will make it easier to cast a ballot—by implementing the country's first automatic registration for eligible voters when they get drivers' licenses and identification documents.

The "Motor Voter" legislation directs the Department of Transportation to "provide Secretary of State with electronic records containing legal name, age, residence and citizenship information and electronic signature of each person who may qualify as elector as prescribed by secretary by rule."

This means that any eligible voter who is not already registered but has done business with the DMV will automatically receive a ballot in the mail 20 days before the state's next election.

The legislation, which will give state residents the option of opting out, is expected to add approximately 300,000 voters.

A wave of legislative attacks on voting rights that has swept the nation has disproportionately blocked poor people, people of color, young people, and seniors across the U.S. from casting ballots. As the Editorial Board of theWashington Postpointed out, Oregon's new measure "won't be perfect" because "many poor and minority voters lack state-issued identification, and they could fall through cracks in Oregon’s automatic registration."

"When you make it convenient to vote, people participate," said Laura Terrill Patten, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon. "We are thrilled about the passage of this bill and the opportunity to get a ballot in the hands of all eligible Oregon voters. While other states are rolling back access to voting rights and women’s health, Oregon continues to lead the way by making voter registration more accessible, more accurate and more secure."

While this is the first such measure in the U.S., automatic registration is more common in other countries. A 2009 report by the Brennan Center for Justice notes that in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and Québec, voter registration is "virtually automatic." All of these countries have far higher registration rates than the United States.

Electoral integrity has not improved in the U.S. over the past year, according to a new study. In fact, elections in Mexico now have more integrity than ours, the new survey, based on the observations of some 1,400 international election experts, finds.

Last year we reported: "A report [PDF] by researchers at Harvard and the University of Sydney finds the U.S. ranks just 26th on a global index of election integrity. That finding places the U.S. in the category of nations with 'Moderate' election integrity, ranking the country one notch above Mexico and one notch below Micronesia, according to the findings tracking elections in 66 countries."

Well, bad news --- of a sort. This year's new Electoral Integrity Project report [PDF] is now out. It takes into account the 2014 mid-term elections in the U.S. and more elections in a number of additional countries. It appears the U.S. has fallen a few pegs from it's 26th place ranking in last year's report [emphasis in the original]...

[C]ontests in the United States scored the worst performance among any long-established democracy. Hence the 2012 Presidential elections was ranked 42nd worldwide, while the 2014 mid-term Congressional races was ranked 45th, similar to Colombia and Bulgaria. One reason is that experts expressed growing concern over US electoral laws and processes of voter registration, both areas of heated partisan debate.

To make matters worse, the survey fails to examine the effects of vote-casting and counting technology on the integrity of elections. But, while the new report highlights what appears to be a huge drop in U.S. election integrity since last year's study, with our most recent national elections now ranked just worse than Mexico's and slightly better than those in Barbados, it's not all as bad as the plummeting ranking would seem to suggest...

Broader data this year

The Electoral Integrity Project's report is based on input from election experts worldwide, examining "all national parliamentary and presidential elections held in independent nation-states (with a population of more than 100,000)."

The previous report, the group's first, covered "73 national parliamentary and presidential contests held worldwide in 66 countries from 1 July 2012 to 31 December 2013."

The new one, however, surveys a larger number of countries and several more election cycles in them, covering "127 national parliamentary and presidential contests held worldwide in 107 countries from 1 July 2012 to 31 December 2014."

So with more countries (now 107, rather than 66) and more elections (now 127, rather than 73) graded by the experts, the overall rankings have changed a bit.

Where the 2012 U.S. Presidential election was rated in last years report as having only "moderate" integrity, by the study's benchmark, the 2014 Congressional elections in the U.S. slipped a bit lower.

"The number of elections has expanded," project leader Pippa Norris of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government explained to The BRAD BLOG via email, "so it isn't clear whether there has actually been a fall. Better to say that the 2014 US midterms were ranked slightly lower than the 2012 presidential elections."

Each election cycle in each country is graded by the experts in the study. That input is placed into a 100-point index and then a comparative ranking based on 49 different indicators in 11 different stages of elections, such as Electoral Laws, Electoral Procedures, Voter Registration, Media Coverage, Campaign Finance and Voting Process.

The index is compiled in the survey into a "Perception of Electoral Integrity" (PEI) index. The 2012 Presidential election in the U.S. scored a 70.2 PEI. By that measure, it was ranked just just behind Micronesia's 2013 legislative election. The new score for the 2014 Congressional elections in the U.S. slipped to 69.3, one notch in the rankings ahead of Colombia and just behind both Barbados and Mexico.

Where the 2012 Presidential election ranked 26th overall in the previous report, that same election now ranks 42nd among the larger sample. Our Congressional election ranked 45th.

U.S. elections 'relatively poor'

According to the new report, the project's "concept of 'electoral integrity' refers to international standards and global norms governing the appropriate conduct of elections."

Some forty domestic and international experts were consulted about each election covered in the report, reflecting the views of 1,429 election experts.

'Elections in United States stand out as relatively poorly ranked by experts compared with other established democracies, deserving further scrutiny.'

The study finds "Elections in United States stand out as relatively poorly ranked by experts compared with other established democracies, deserving further scrutiny."

For similar reasons offered in last year's report, when the studies' experts rated the overall PEI of the 2012 Presidential election, "The November 2014 Congressional elections got poor grades because experts were concerned about the electoral laws, voter registration, the process of drawing district boundaries, as well as regulation of campaign finance."

The study cites U.S. voter registration, "in particular", as a concern. It cites new laws regarding access to the polls as "increasingly polarized and litigious...ever since the 2000 'Florida' debacle, generating growing controversy in state-houses and the courts."

"America also suffers from exceptionally partisan and decentralized arrangements for electoral administration," according to the study, which finds that recent Supreme Court decisions "suggest that the role of money in American politics deserves more detailed scrutiny."

What about the machines?

While the study examines a number of aspects during the "Vote Count" stage of elections, such as whether or not ballot boxes are "secure"; whether results are announced "without undue delay"; whether votes are "counted fairly"; and whether or not international and domestic election monitors are restricted, the survey fails to examine specific methods of vote casting and counting and the effect that may have on reported election results.

As The BRAD BLOG has spent more than ten years documenting, the method used for vote casting and counting --- and, with it, the electorate's ability to oversee the accuracy of the count --- this is no small matter. How votes are cast and tabulated can have an extraordinary effect (positively or negatively) on both the accuracy of elections as well as confidence in reported results.

Computerized voting systems --- such as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines --- are 100% impossible to verify for accuracy after polls have closed. Yet, they are still used in about one-third of the country, and elsewhere around the world.

Hand-marked paper ballots can be examined after an election, but most jurisdictions in the U.S. tally those ballots by computerized optical-scan systems which either report results accurately or not. Without a human examination of those paper ballots --- only sometimes allowed in the rare event a recount --- it's impossible to know whether results have been accurately tallied and reported.

By way of just one recent example, which citizens happened to notice, a November 2014 referendum in a small Wisconsin town, tallied by a computerized optical-scan system last year, reported only 16 votes cast by some 5,350 voters. Luckily, the problem was so obvious, attributed to a programming error by a local election official, it was too ridiculous to be overlooked. The correct results were eventually determined by publicly hand-counting the hand-marked paper ballots.

But what of malfunction or malfeasance in vote counts that are not so easily discovered, thanks to a lack of human-verified results? For example, a computer optical-scan system in Palm Beach County, FL announced the "winners" of four different elections incorrectly in 2012. Only a sharp-eyed election official and an eventual court-sanction hand-count determined that three of four of the originally announced "winners" were actually the losers of their races. In New York's 2010 elections, thousands of ballots were inaccurately tallied by op-scan systems, though the failure was not publicly confirmed until 2012.

Those are just a few of the scores (if not hundreds) of similar reports we've covered over the years. And, of course, the accuracy of results from DRE systems can never be discovered at all. Jurisdictions that use them should clearly have their rankings penalized by the Election Integrity Project, whose report is subtitled "Why elections fail and what we can do about it". But so should jurisdictions which do not verify results or allow citizens to do so themselves. Additionally, the effect that such systems have on overall confidence in the results of elections, and subsequent interest by citizens in participating in them, should not be overlooked.

On this point, Harvard's Norris explained to us that their study is "technology neutral" and does not factor in such elements. "We don't ask questions about specific types of technologies, in part because this varies from place to place," she said.

While she correctly notes that "many countries don't use electronic technologies in balloting," she did not seem particularly receptive to the point that the way in which votes are cast and tabulated (and whether that count can be overseen by the public and known to be accurate) is a key aspect of electoral integrity. Her responses confirmed that those elements are only cursorily analyzed in the report by the very generalized questions regarding whether "Ballot boxes were secure" and if "Votes were counted fairly", and, perhaps, the question regarding whether "election monitors were restricted". (Naturally, if those monitors are unable to see inside a computer as to whether a vote is tabulated accurately, that would seem to be a very severe "restriction" on monitoring the most important point of the process.)

"There is no reason to assume a priori that vote counts using electronic or paper ballots are necessarily more honest or accurate," she says. That's a point we would vigorously dispute, even if only in the perception of accuracy, and the negative effect that unverified tallies have on confidence in elections and, thus, election integrity itself.

Norris adds: "The expert survey is only one component of the larger project and data collection. For example, we have another related project looking at public opinion towards electoral integrity."

The Electoral Integrity Project is relatively young. The broader scope of data analyzed in this year's new report is helpful, even as it shakes up previous rankings a bit. That's not unexpected as the breadth of their work matures. But, while offering a valuable comparative analysis of the integrity of various world democracies certainly provides a helpful yardstick --- and hopefully encourage countries to improve their own standings --- inclusion of the net effects of the type of vote-casting and counting systems used (along with the ability for the citizenry to oversee and verify results produced by them), would be a valuable and much-needed addition to their work.

This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the "Bloody Sunday" assault in Alabama, where on March 7, 1965, police violently assaulted hundreds of demonstrators attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the fatal police shooting of 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson.

AP

Hurling clubs and tear-gas cannisters, state and local police viciously attacked more than 500 people that day. Images and footage capturing the violence shocked the nation and left an indelible mark on the civil rights movement. The march forced a new level of public awareness of the struggles shouldered by civil rights activists and African Americans, and is credited for helping pave the way for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

James "Spider" Martin, who died in 2003, was a young photographer at theBirmingham News assigned to cover the march. NPR recently broadcast an interview he did in 1987 about the day's brutal events.

"He walks over to me and, blow! Hits me right here in the back of the head," Martin said upon recalling a moment when a police officer approached him. "I still got a dent in my head and I still have nerve damage there. I go down on my knees and I'm like seeing stars and there's tear gas everywhere. And then he grabs me by the shirt and he looks straight in my eyes and he just dropped me and said, 'Scuse me. Thought you was a nigger.'"

President Obama and many other dignitaries are scheduled to visit Selma this weekend to commemorate the anniversary. On Friday, Obama called the work of civil rights activists an "unfinished project." The president's comment came in the wake of numerous high profile deaths of black men at the hands of police, and just days after a federal investigation cleared former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown last August, of possible civil rights violations. At the same time, the Justice Department released a federal report detailing years of rampant racial discrimination, including disproportionate arrests of African Americans, carried out by the Ferguson Police Department.

Brown's death and the failure of a grand jury to indict Wilson sparked a firestorm of debate over policing policies, with violent protests demanding police reform and that Wilson be prosecuted breaking out across the country. Many say the aggressive display of force by police officials towards non-violent demonstrators in Ferguson mirrored the events in Selma nearly fifty years prior.

AP/Charlie Riedel

Also at the forefront of this weekend's "Bloody Sunday" anniversary is the Supreme Court's recent gutting of the pivotal Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of discrimination to seek federal authority before attempting to alter local voting laws. In 2013, the court voted 5-4 to strike down a crucial tenet of the landmark legislation. The decision ultimately allowed states, including North Carolina and Texas, to enact strict voter ID laws without automatic Justice Department review. Many say such laws make it increasingly difficult for minorities to cast ballots.

"It is perversely ironic to commemorate the past without demonstrating the courage of that past in the present," NAACP president Cornell Brooks told The Atlantic's Russell Berman last week. "In other words we can't really give gold medals to those who marched from Selma to Montgomery without giving a committee vote to the legislation that protects the right to vote today."

Last month, I attended the Ninth Annual Voting And Elections Summit in Washington, hosted by Fair Vote, The Lawyers' Committee For Civil Rights Under Law, US Vote Foundation, and Overseas Vote Foundation, each a progressive organization dedicated to the betterment of elections in the United States. The summit was indeed a gathering of very bright, motivated, devoted, and patriotic individuals and organizations, whose efforts I deeply appreciate.

It was undercut, however, by a tragic, widely shared blindspot regarding the core vulnerability of the American vote counting process, both in theory and in concrete political bottom-line fact. That process, in the computerized voting era, has become and remains unobservable, offering an open invitation to targeted manipulation sweeping in its cumulative effect.

Many inadequacies of our electoral politics were addressed at the summit and many excellent ideas and reforms proposed. But my takeaway, as has often been the case at such well-intended gatherings, was that for all our attempts to redress the visible flaws of our imperfect voting system - from gerrymandering to Big Money to voter suppression to the Electoral College - if at the end of the day radically partisan and secretive outfits that provide the hardware and software that run our privatized system are counting the votes in the darkness of cyberspace, all those other reforms and initiatives will turn out to be unavailing in their effect. We have given Karl Rove, or any operative who views the bottom line and every means of "improving" it with gleeful cynicism, no reason not to keep right on smiling.

We can talk about the progress of democracy, talk about hope, pat each other encouragingly on the back. But the hard reality is that, courtesy of forensically red-flagged down-ballot routs like in 2010 and 2014 coupled with not-much-less-suspect damage control in the "blue" years of 2006, 2008, and 2012 - we now have, across the US, governmental representation more Republican than at any time since the Hoover presidency. And "Republican" itself has come to stand for something far more extreme than Hoover (or Nixon, or possibly even Reagan himself) could have imagined. Indeed, were Hoover or Nixon on the scene today, each would be unelectabl-y "liberal."

Does that remotely square with a fair reading of the current political sentiments of the American electorate? Does it square with a Congressional Approval Rating that plummeted to single digits in 2011 - once the Tea Party-driven new-GOP that took control of the US House in 2010 had begun to pursue its agenda - and has remained there ever since? Does it square with a parade of progressive ballot propositions (pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-public healthcare, pro-minimum wage increase, etc.) that passed in 2014 by landslide margins even in red and purple states, while the right-wing candidates who made opposition to these very initiatives the centerpiece of their campaigns were nevertheless somehow elected? Does it square with exit polls? Does it square with pre-election polls? Does it square with post-election polls? And finally, does it square with a claim that the hard and dedicated work of electoral reformers such as those gathered for the Ninth Annual Voting and Elections Summit has borne any real fruit?

Unfortunately the answer to each of these questions is No. The current political representation of the American public, the bottom-line result of America's unobservable counted elections, is more grotesquely out of sync with every other measure of the public will than it has been at any time since the achievement of general adult suffrage. It is easy enough to follow the media in refusing to connect the dots: a ridiculously vulnerable vote counting system; operatives with a just-win, ends-justify-the-means ethic, plenty of motivation, and access to the programming pipeline; a host of glaring forensic red flags; and the bizarre distortion and transformation of American politics we are now witnessing. Even for those who suspect a grave and growing malignancy, it is somehow comforting to see it as a function of strictly overt processes - gerrymandering and the like - politics as usual.

How do you tell the heavy-hitters at the summit that they are spitting at the wrong spot, or at the very least missing a critical one (with only our national, and indeed global, future riding on it)? We who aspire to electoral integrity would be far too bright to keep trying to fill a bucket without checking it for a hole, so why aren't we bright enough to apply that same logic to a voting system that has a fatal flaw, a hole in its bucket that keeps showing up on our forensic radar?

Why is it "unthinkable" to so many of us that that glaring flaw is being exploited? Why, in the age of scandal - of Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, fake anthrax, massive data hacks and identity thefts, secret surveillance programs, Little League ringers! - do we continue collectively to act as if our elections, the highest stakes game of all, are essentially immune, worthy only of partial and, it must be said, desultory scrutiny and protection? Why isn't observable vote counting the very first priority of all who seek to rescue our democracy from the quicksand into which it has wandered?

An observable count is a voting right and, until we collectively recognize it as such and concertedly act to secure it, our sovereignty will continue tragically to disappear through the hole in the bottom of America's political bucket.

As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive innovation. Cities Rising is The Nation’s chronicle of those urban experiments.

* * *

Chicago has scant recent history of upsetting electoral expectations—especially those of municipal strongmen with all the connections and cash that a corrupted campaign-finance system now lavishes on servants of the powerful. So it can fairly be said that a political miracle of sorts swept the Windy City on February 24, when Rahm Emanuel, known among constituents as “Mayor 1 Percent,” was forced into a runoff for re-election. That his challenger, Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, is a committed progressive backed by a diverse grassroots coalition startled even veteran observers and rewrote the city’s civic calculus.

“Now,” argues the Chicago Reader, “it’s time for the real mayoral debate.” This is not just a Chicago debate; it goes to the question of how Democratic mayors, governors and, yes, presidents should respond to income inequality, racial injustice and a democracy deficit that too often leaves cities in the grip of pay-to-play privatizers and austerity evangelists.

Emanuel was supposedly set for easy re-election. He had the power of incumbency, the backing of the city’s major dailies, support from remnants of Chicago’s Democratic machine and an endorsement by his former boss, President Obama. He also had a twelve-to-one spending advantage, fueled by out-of-town interests hungry for a piece of a city so clearly up for grabs. But Emanuel fell short of the mark—and Garcia, who earned 34 percent of the vote to the mayor’s 45, is gaining in the polls as the April 7 runoff campaign ramps up.

Still, it won’t be easy for Garcia and his multiracial coalition of teachers, low-wage workers, and neighborhood activists to upset a former White House aide and chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Emanuel has spent decades serving the interests of power, and those interests relish the way he has—in the words of Bill Curry, who worked with him in the Clinton White House—“made the city a testing ground for two major conservative agendas: corporate education reform and ‘privatization.’”

Emanuel’s assaults on public education, including the closing of fifty neighborhood schools, galvanized the opposition. Widespread support for a 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike hinted at the mayor’s vulnerability. The union’s dynamic president, Karen Lewis, looked like his strongest challenger until she was sidelined last fall by illness. Lewis and progressives then turned to Garcia, who had a solidly pro-labor, pro-economic-and-social-justice record as legislator, alderman and commissioner, but little name recognition and less money. His strong showing confirms that a passion for public education now animates Chicago politics. So, too, does the fact that teachers and progressives have forced a number of Emanuel’s allies into City Council runoffs.

But what’s happening in Chicago is about more than one issue. It’s about ensuring that America’s third-largest city meets the needs of working families and neglected neighborhoods. That is the dream deferred for almost thirty years, since the death of Mayor Harold Washington, the last insurgent to beat the machine and the money power. Washington was given little chance when he started his run in 1983, but a campaign that combined civil-rights energy and economic-justice themes prevailed, inspiring rainbow coalitions in cities across the country and Jesse Jackson’s challenge to the moribund national Democratic Party.

Democrats who realize that today’s party must change to reach disenchanted voters will recognize the role that another Chicago miracle could play in heralding a new and necessary progressive populist moment.

California has the most votes at stake on Super Tuesday, but counting those returns could take a lot longer than usual. Electronic voting machines in more than 20 counties have been scrapped because of security concerns.

In the 2000 presidential election, Riverside became the first county in the nation to move entirely to electronic voting.

"We were very, very nervous knowing no one had done it before. On other hand, it was very exciting knowing we were on the cutting edge of technology, deploying this equipment we knew we were going to be able to count votes quicker," says Riverside County Registrar Barbara Dunmore.

Most of Riverside's 3,700 electronic voting units will not be used as planned this year, however.

A study led by UC Berkeley computer scientist David Wagner revealed that e-voting is not as secure and reliable as it should be. As a result, electronic voting machines were decertified across California.

"We found the voting systems — all three of them we looked at — were susceptible to computer viruses," Wagner says.

"An attacker could craft a specially tailored computer virus that could spread throughout a county, and once it infected all the voting machines in a county, could miscount or misrecord the votes."

Wagner says any high-tech attacks would have required sophisticated hackers, but the bottom line is that it was possible to throw a close election.

Now 20 counties are scrambling to prepare for Tuesday's primary. Like Riverside County, most are using election workers to input paper ballots into old-style optical scanners.

Paul Shook is one of the elections workers at county headquarters who now has to hand-feed stacks of paper ballots. They sometimes have to be double-checked and rewritten if a voter makes a mistake or writes in some unofficial candidate.

"Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck ... a lot of times you get Superman also," he says.

On election night, county workers here will have to wait for truckloads of paper ballots to be delivered from remote desert and mountain areas.

Dunmore says it's going to mean the election results won't be tallied for hours or even days.

"E-voting went a long way to make sure all votes recorded accurately. To go back to paper that is so labor intensive, it's gonna be a long night election day," Dunmore says.

Some of Riverside's electronic voting machines will still be available for blind or disabled voters. And Dunmore is hopeful that all of the devices will be recertified one day.

"Using all of this paper to me is like charging forward to the past," she says.

Since the Bush-Cheney-Rove theft of the 2000 election in Florida, the right of millions of American citizens to vote and have that vote counted has been under constant assault.

In 2014, that systematic disenfranchisement may well have delivered the US Senate to the Republican Party. If nothing significant is done about it by 2016, we can expect the GOP to take the White House and much more.

The primary victims of this GOP-led purge have been young, elderly, poor and citizens of color who tend to vote Democratic. The denial of their votes has changed the face of our government, and is deepening corporate control of our lives and planet.

There’s no doubt the Democrats have alienated their core constituency and given millions of their former supporters little reason to vote. Perpetual war, blank checks for mega-banks, stiffing the working poor while giving away the planet to the rich—these are all part of the malaise. Our political landscape is currently defined by corporate personhood and its gutting of the Democratic Party.

Part of that is the destruction of our electoral rights, and the refusal of the Democrats to even face the issue, let alone do something about it. Our voting system is, to put it mildly, bought and rigged, further feeding the deadening sense of public futility and frustration.

As the GOP moves toward total control of our governance—the media, the internet, the Supreme Court, the Congress, local government and, in 2016, the presidency—our future depends on knowing the nuts and bolts of how the destruction of our democracy proceeds, and what we can do to stop it.

In this year’s takeover of the US Senate and many statehouses, barely more than a third of the eligible citizenry was credited with having voted. Official vote counts gave the GOP a consistent “bonus” of about 5% over pre-election polls. In the US Senate race in North Carolina and the Governor’s race in Florida, that margin clearly gave the Republicans their victories, and probably did the same in many other close races.

The GOP’s Jim Crow disenfranchisement campaign has outright robbed millions of citizens of their right to vote. It’s deliberately created an air of confusion and doubt that’s further suppressed the turnout.

Greg Palast, for example, has reported extensively on the Kansas-based “cross-check” technique, used in 28 states, where Republican secretaries of state denied voting rights based on arbitrary judgements that allowed them to eliminate several million potential Democratic voters. (Greg will discuss this on the Solartopia Show at prn.fm Tuesday, 11/11, 5pm EST; the show will be archived for later listening).

In evaluating the actual vote count, manipulation of untrackable electronic voting machines must also be accounted for.

Over the years, Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, Jon Simon, Richard Charney and many others have added vital research leading to the inevitable conclusion that the 2014 election—like 2000 and 2004—was essentially bought, rigged, stolen and lynched.

We do not believe the Republican Party legitimately won the US Senate or many of the statehouses they’ve been granted, any more than George W. Bush should have been handed the White House in 2000 and 2004.

Unless we finally face the core issues of election protection, history could repeat itself in 2016 as both tragedy and farce.

Because the dust is still settling, many of the specifics about 2014 remain hidden. In the coming weeks we’ll present as much of the evidence as we can gather.

In the meantime, we welcome President Obama’s new statements supporting net neutrality. There’s no more important foundation for what shreds of democracy remain to us than the ability to freely communicate. Handing control of the internet to mega-corporations, as proposed by the current (Democratic) head of the Federal Communications Commission, would be catastrophic. As with reclaiming our elections, our future on this planet demands an open global highway for unfettered communication. We must do everything we can to preserve and expand it.

We also congratulate US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for proposing that election day become a national holiday. After the 2004 debacle, we proposed a four-day election holiday to cover the first Saturday, Sunday, Monday & Tuesday in November. (The Constitution requires that voting happen the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November). This four-day stretch would help enshrine access to our election process as the sacred ritual it should be.

We also propose universal automatic voter registration, universal hand-counted paper ballots, abolition of the Electoral College, and a massive reform of the role of money in politics.

We hope Sen. Sanders’ initial proposal opens the door to a bottom-up remake of our electoral system. Without it, our democracy is nothing more than a hollow shell.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll explore how that shell was cracked yet again in 2014.

All indicators are that it could be definitively crushed in two years if we don’t act now.

Elections are supposed to have consequences. When countries establish electoral processes that are sufficiently free and functional to ascertain the clear will of the people—and when those votes are cast and counted in an election that draws a solid majority of eligible voters to the polls—that will should be expressed as something more than a New York Timesheadline or a Fox News alert. It should be expressed in leadership, law and governance.

That governance should be sufficient to address poverty, tame inequality and conquer injustice. And if outside forces thwart those initiatives, that government should challenge them on behalf of the common good. After all, if meaningful economic and social change cannot by achieved (or at the very least demanded) with a stroke of the ballot pen, then what is the point of an election?

Questions about the point of elections are common in the United States, where the political process has decayed rapidly in an era of money-drenched campaigns, narrowly-defined debates, exceptionally low turnout elections and gridlocked government. On the eve of the 2014 mid-term elections in the United States, Gallup polling found that the percentage of Americans who said they were “extremely motivated” to vote had fallen to 32 percent—from 50 percent in 2010. An analysis of the numbers by Gallup’s editor-in-chief suggested that Americans might “have reached the point where they don’t believe their vote for a specific person, of either party, is going to change much.”

In fairness to today’s candidates and parties, the challenge of coherent governing is as old as the American experiment. There is no question, however, that the problem has been exacerbated in recent years by an increasingly rigid system in which two parties compete not just for votes but for the contributions of a billionaire class of campaign donors who extract a price from politicians of both parties: subservience to the demands of political paymasters when it comes to setting tax rates, regulating banks and establishing budget priorities.

What the populists and progressives of a century ago referred to as “the money power” now games the system to assure that it is never disempowered. Governments may be focused and empowered by high-turnout presidential elections, but they are quickly unfocused and disempowered by low-turnout midterm elections. There is no question that discussions of democracy reforms must include proposals to eliminate an Electoral College that can place the loser of the popular vote in the White House, to redistricting practices that can place the party that loses the popular vote in congressional contests across the country in charge of the House of Representatives, to close the loophole that allows governors to fill US Senatevacancies by appointment, and to guarantee the right to vote and to have that vote counted.

Yet, even if the process was designed to allow for more decisive and representative governance, the United States would still be stuck with a politics defined overwhelmingly by the whims and furies of billionaires—with very little room left for the ideas and ideals of citizens. Until this reality is addressed with a constitutional amendment declaring that money is not speech, that corporations are not people and that citizens and their elected representatives are free to organize elections where votes matter more than dollars, that reality will continue to limit prospects for governance of, by and for the people.

In other countries, however, there are different circumstances, different systems, different possibilities. Can their elections bring fundamental change? And can they teach the rest of the world—including countries such as the United States, where the democratic infrastructure has so decayed that barely one-third of the potential voters participated in the recent mid-term elections—something about how elections are supposed to work?

That’s the democracy question that arises in the aftermath of a Greek election that has the potential to transform not just one country but the global debate about austerity. Even those who might not agree with the policies of Syriza—the radical coalition of parties and ideological tendencies that has swept to power on a promise to renew civil society in a country battered by imposed austerity—should recognize that what is at stake is more than economic policy. What is at stake is the question of whether the democratic impulse, which can be traced to ancient Greece, will have meaning in the modern world.

As Sunday’s election results confirmed that Syriza had surfed a wave of anti-austerity sentiment into a first-place finish that positioned it to form the next Greek government, the headline in Britain’s Guardian newspaper declared: “Voters Reject EU Austerity for Radical Alternative.”

There was little question regarding the rejection of austerity. Close to 65 percent of the Greek electorate participated in Sunday’s election, as opposed to last November's turnout in the United States of just 33 percent of the voting age population (and 36 percent of the “voting eligible population”). And Syriza, after increasing its share of the vote by almost 10 percent, won 149 of 300 seats in the parliament; the next-closest party (that of the defeated prime minister) won just seventy-six.

Those results earned notice far beyond Europe, as the political struggle against economic austerity is a global concern. “The Syriza victory in the Greek elections tells us that people around the world will no longer accept austerity for working families while the rich continue to get much richer," said Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. "The top 1 percent of the world’s population will soon own more wealth than the bottom 99 percent. This is wrong and unsustainable from a moral, economic and political perspective.”

Syriza’s alternative to the savage cuts in human services, high unemployment, scorching inequality and hopelessness—which were forced upon Greece by the “troika” of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund after bankers gone wild crashed the global economy—will not be easily achieved. The demand for an upending of policies that have “reduced [Greece] to penury” places the new government on what The Guardian suggests will be a “collision course” with the politicians and bankers who have imposed austerity policies and the concentration of wealth and power that extends from them.

But, finally, Greece has a government that is prepared to fight on behalf of its people, rather than to sign away their future. And that fight, which begins with a demand for a European conference to write down unsustainable debt, is about much more than Greece. Syriza’s victory, a spokesman for the party explained Sunday night, “sends a message that does not only concern the Greek people but all Europeans.”

Everyone who has been paying attention in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland—countries that have been brutalized by austerity policies—recognizes precisely what is at stake. “There is only one place for Ireland to be at this moment of truth and it’s not on the fence,” the Irish essayist Fintan O’Toole wrote in a pre-election column. “It’s with Syriza.”

A petition in solidarity with Syriza that has been signed by political leaders and trade unionists, environmentalists and human-rights activists from across Europe reads in part:

Greece is the most striking example of what happens when political matters are being dealt with by economic powers. The fact that non-democratic entities such as the European Central Bank or the IMF sort out problems which were created by those same economic powers in the first place, is a serious step back regarding the concept of democracy as a whole, which used to guarantee that the citizens’ decision was the most sacred contract within European societies.…

We think that Syriza’s victory can be the starting point of what will stop the trend which, in the name of financial speculation, is destroying economies, the environment and the well-being of the people.

The struggle of the coming weeks and months will be about more than economics.

At a polling place in Athens on Sunday, a voter told a reporter, “I just voted for the party that’s going to change Greece. In fact, the party that’s going to change the whole of Europe.”

That change begins with the faith of voters that an election can change a country, a continent, a world.

This is what democracy is supposed to mean for citizens.

This is what democracy is supposed to look like.

Democracy is not supposed to be boring. It is not supposed to be so predictable that elections can be called before campaigns have begun. It is not supposed to sustain an unfair and unequal status quo. It is not supposed to dull the appetite for real reform. It is not supposed to be so frustrating and dysfunctional that the great mass of potential voters is turned by the political process itself into the great mass of non-voters.

Countries that have not developed a democracy sufficient to the challenge of producing meaningful change—or that have allowed their democratic infrastructure to decay so thoroughly that little faith remains in the prospect of real change, in the prospect of an election that might produce “a new birth of freedom” or a “New Deal” or a “Great Society”—should recognize in the results from Greece an example of democracy’s potential.

That does not mean that Syriza and its allies in other European countries will succeed in charging every economic policy, or even most economic policies. That does not mean that everyone can or will agree with Syriza’s approach to every issue. The party’s political progress has won support from Greek voters who differ with elements of Syriza’s manifesto, just as it has been cheered on by Europeans who do not occupy the same space on the ideological spectrum as Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras.

This support is grounded in a belief, or at the very least a hope, that elections still matter in these times—that politics can be more than mere theater, more than a game played by elites that are already rich and already powerful. This is not a new faith. It is an old faith that democratic experiments begun long ago, with all the inspiration and energy of the enlightenment, might yet begin the world over again.

Mitch McConnell thinks that there wasn't enough spending in the last election. The incoming-Senate Majority Leader wants to slip a new campaign finance loophole into the upcoming budget bill.

Currently, individual candidates can receive $5,200 per donor in an election cycle, but national and state party committees can receive much, much more. There are regulatory limits on how much those parties can coordinate with candidates on political advertising. However, McConnell is trying to attach a policy rider to the omnibus bill that would remove the restrictions on candidates and parties working together to coordinate spending on advertising.

The only restriction left in McConnell's rider says that party spending could not be “controlled by, or made at the direction of” the candidate. It doesn't take a criminal mastermind to see how easy it would be to get around that guideline.

If his rider is successful, it would make the individual campaign contribution limits meaningless, as billionaires could simply donate more to the parties and candidates could influence how that money is spent.

McConnell himself helped clear the path for massive donations to parties in the McCutcheon case – which eliminated the aggregate cap on how much one individual could donate to political parties. Now, the Republican leader wants to be rewarded for his hard work.

We've seen the damage that massive campaign spending has done to our political system. We must continue to call for an amendment that says money is not speech, and we've got to fight hard to keep the meager regulations we've got left.

Call your Senators and tell them to keep McConnell's rider out of the budget, and tell them that we will keep fighting until we get the money out of our political system once and for all.